Girls are the key to transforming Iran.

I believe that until and unless the social and academic education of girls is linked to the disparity in their social status and rights, as women, humanity will muddle from one tragedy to another atrocity. While Iran has a high rate of literacy and girls have access to academic schooling, the Islamic seeding of our society continues to relegate girls and women into a position of inferiority and subjugation in society. Can anyone dispute the power that women can exert in the ultimate transformation of our society?

Unless, the next generation of Iranians transcend the beleaguered standards which have diminished their social capacity and constrained their liberty, we cannot expect a recognition of, first, the importance of girls, as future mothers, in transforming society, and, second, the impact of their unleashed potential in uplifting a society into the heights of enduring peace, prosperity, and social justice.

If we were able to make this connection, I have no doubt that, in my life time, we would see the abandonment of war as an instrument of conflict resolution, elimination of the enormous disparity in wealth, a reversal in the pollution of our environment, and the restoration of Iran to its rightful station.

We as Iranians, having suffered so much under the yoke of tyranny, dogma, and exploitation, during the last 1000 years, should realize that it is precisely this enduring toll that qualifies us to feel enough pain that compels us to transform our land from the darkest corner of this world to a shining beacon of hope and prosperity.

Faced with the reality that the world will not rally around a US-led war against Iran, the Trump administration seeks to resurrect the specter of IS to manufacture international support for its continued military presence in the Middle East.

Faced with the reality that the world will not rally around a US-led war against Iran, the Trump administration seeks to resurrect the specter of IS to manufacture international support for its continued military presence in the Middle East.